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Extracting Unique Elements from a List

Problem

You want to eliminate duplicate values from a list.

Solution

There are several possible solutions for this problem. Here are some of these:

Using lists:usort

The lists module contains a wealth of list processing functionality. One possible solution to this problem is to use the lists:usort function, which takes a list and returns a sorted copy of the original list, with all duplicates removed:

1> UL = [1,2,8,7,8,10,3,12,3,99,188,3,2,1,3,5,15,72].
[1,2,8,7,8,10,3,12,3,99,188,3,2,1,3,5,15,72]
2> lists:usort(UL).
[1,2,3,5,7,8,10,12,15,72,99,188]

Using the sets Module

Erlang standard libraries includes a module, sets, with a variety of functions related to generating, creating, and manipulating mathematical sets.

10> Set = sets:from_list(UL).
{sets,12,
      16,
      16,
      8,
      80,
      48,
      {[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[]},
      {{[],[99,3],[],[],"\274\f",[15],[2],[5],"H\b",[],[],[1],[],[7],"\n",[]}}}
11> sets:to_list(Set).
[3,99,12,188,15,2,5,8,72,1,7,10]

Using a General Balanced Tree Set (gb_set)

Erlang's standard libraries includes an implementation of Professor Arne Andersson's General Balanced Trees. These structures are more costly than sorting lists for small sets, but this is a much more efficient implementation when working with large sets of data.

The gb_set:from_list function will produce an ordered set of elements (dropping duplicates). The set can then be extracted back to a list for other use:

3> GBSet = gb_sets:from_list(UL).
{12,
 {10,
  {5,{2,{1,nil,nil},{3,nil,nil}},{8,{7,nil,nil},nil}},
  {72,{15,{12,nil,nil},nil},{188,{99,nil,nil},nil}}}}
4> gb_sets:to_list(GBSet).
[1,2,3,5,7,8,10,12,15,72,99,188]

Comments about this recipe

Contributors

-- BrentAFulgham - 28 Aug 2004